The Clbuttic Mistake: When obscenity filters go horribly wrong

[DBear]

excerpt:

President Abraham Lincoln was buttbuttinated by an armed buttailant after a life devoted to the reform of the US consbreastution.

Not an extract from an essay by a particularly poor history student, but a selection of the nonsense phrases created by automatic software designed to remove offensive words from articles posted on the internet.

The phenomena, known as “The Clbuttic Mistake” after a mangling of the word “classic” that is believed to be the first identified instance of the problem, can be found on tens of thousands of websites.

The error is caused by poorly programmed anti-obscenity filters – similar to spell checkers – that automatically replace words considered rude or offensive with more acceptable variants. “Butt” replaces “ass”, “breast” is substituted for “tit”, and so on.

Rudimentary versions of this software do not just replace obscene words, but also alter longer words which contain banned letter combinations, so "assassination" becomes "buttbuttination", "passenger" becomes "pbuttenger", and "passerby" becomes "pbutterby".

The problem is fairly widespread; Google searches turn up 3,810 results for “clbuttic”, 5,120 for “consbreastution”, and 1,450 for “Buttociated Press”, a corruption of the US news agency the Associated Press. Perhaps the most celebrated instance of the Clbuttic Mistake comes in an article currently visible on the website jucee.org .

...

The American Family Association had programmed its filter to replace the word “gay” with “homosexual”, causing an article about sprinter Tyson Gay’s triumph at the US Olympic trials to begin: “Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has." Further on in the piece the runner was referred to as “the 25-year-old Homosexual.”

London Telegraph

 

[Bigfoot3814]

Hecko? Hecko?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I find "Buttociated Press" to be rather well suited, don't you?

 

[Evie]

Remind me of the Family Guy Star Wars episode.

"Don't get penisy" indeed.

 

[Bigfoot3814]

I find "Buttociated Press" to be rather well suited, don't you?

 

[JohnRM]

That is too freakin' funny.

 

[Bigfoot3814]

John Hanpenis.

 

[Masquerouge]

buttbuttinated is awesome. It sounds a LOT kinkier than assassinated!

 

[Evie]

There is also the always classical, Penis Cheney.

And is it just me or is a Penispit a lot more suspicious than a Cockpit?

I'm of the firm opinion that automated censors should be illegal technology because of all this

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

"Buttailant"? Makes you wonder...

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

This is also known as the S****horpe problem after an English city that often gets censored.

 

[Mirc]

This fits music so well...

Only because I have a very deep bbutt voice, and I know a guy who plays the double bbutt so great it's hardly believable! And he does it with great pbuttion too.

 

[Fadan80]

The "breastle" of this thread is wrong!!!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

This is a problem that should be easily fixed. These filters are (or should be) designed to allow the programmer to specify if the filter is exact or loose. Exact filtering, for example, is why our very own CFC doesn't allow some words, but lets derivatives of those words get through. Loose filtering is what makes absurd situations happen such as those described in the OP.

And then there's the stupid situation that happened a few years ago on a forum where I used to run a writing competition. I hadn't realized the word "crap" was filtered. One of the competitors used the word in his story... and the word was rendered not in alternate text, but in a spinning skull graphic. I promptly PM'd the admins and asked them to stop filtering that word and pointed out that if the word didn't offend me -- who had a reputation for being one of the most easily-offended people on that entire forum -- why should it offend anyone else?

 

[Mise]

Svaginathorpe.

 

[Bill3000]

Svaginathorpe.

It would be Svaginahorpe

 

[Mise]

It would be Svaginahorpe

Well that just sounds stupid.

 

[Yeekim]

What the f*ck does anyone need obscenity filters for anyway?
I can understand desire to keep one's children away from gazillion of bizarre images on the web, but if you find pornographic article, then "censoring" ass into butt does not make it any less obscene for me

 

[Winner]

This is just hilarious

 

[Brighteye]

I never thought that 'ass' or 'tit' were bad words. On the other hand, I would avoid using 'butt' to mean bottom, and I have been astonished to find that that crap is considered inoffensive in the US.